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January 2014

Friday, 31 January 2014

Every artist, I believe, in every art, has touchstones—works of greatness or œuvres of past artists with which he or she will engage fully, in an ongoing conversation of passion, learning, and open-heartedness. We can't engage fully with everything we'd like to; we can't even experience everything there is, much less engage with everything. So the touchstones are symbols, stand-ins—best cases; we adopt some work or works of art or science or scholarship or music or craft or literature as "ours" in order to become intimately familiar, artistically and aesthetically, with something. They are in a sense the "handles" by which we latch ourselves on to the great train human endeavor and achievement as we catch a ride. Old friend, adversary, instructor, "familiar," to which we intermittently always return.

Mike(Thanks to Jim Schley)

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)Featured Comments from:

Geoff Wittig: "That surely resonates as true for me. As Mike notes, the world of photography is far too vast to get a grip on it all. Some of it I just don't get, some I actively loathe. But there's a lot of it I like, and some of it rings like a bell to me, hitting a pitch-perfect note in sync with my personal sense of artistry. It'll be a slightly different body of work for everyone, but I'd bet most folks with an opinion about what photographs fall into the 'art' category have their own touchstones. The exact same thing applies to painting, at least for me. Many genres of painting really do nothing for me, but many appeal, and a narrower slice really resonate with the same kind of vision I'm trying to achieve. Of course, the next person might look at my notion of the ideal painting and gag. But that's why every museum has a different slant to its collection. It's a big universe of visual experience. If I dislike something, I just move on to the next painting or photograph."

Ed Kirkpatrick: "Interestingly, for me at least, it's not anything photographic but the work of the French Impressionists and especially, Monet and Renoir. I am lucky enough to live in Washington DC where The Phillips Collection features many of their great works but most especially, Renoir's 'Luncheon of the Boating Party.' The way they saw light fascinates me, and I will periodically go down to sit and stare at this piece. There is no end of visual pleasure and that refreshes me."

John Camp: "Pieter Bruegel. Cezanne. I Ido have a photograph that I keep coming back to, not for aesthetic reasons but for utilitarian ones—and that's Adams' 'Moonrise.' A very large number of people have seen this print, because there are a lot of them around—and the printing and exposure are exquisite, and the subject matter compelling. There is no such thing as 'the best photograph,' but Moonlight is a kind of 'standard candle' that you can compare everything else to, because almost anyone seriously interested in photography is aware of it, and many have seen either original prints or very, very good reproductions."

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

ADDENDUM by Crabby Umbo: "...I should qualify that statement! It's still tough to get 'film look' in all digital, but I have to say that in terms of sharpness and 'blow-up-ability,' modern digital is better, and Micro 4/3 is easily the 'new' 35mm for photojournalists and those who always used the smaller formats, especially for ease of carry.

"I'm always amazed at how unsharp a lot of my 35mm stuff was in the olden days, and how most sharpness for small formats on a print was really the effect of the sharp grain rather than actual sharpness of the format. When the chromogenic B&W films first came out, I was amazed at how my small format stuff was not looking sharp, because there was no grain to be sharp on a print and give the effect of sharpness. Okay then...."

Featured Comments from:

robert: "These things are hard to compare. Full-frame is so much better than analog 35mm and had some designs on medium format, yet—if I make a 24" print from full-frame digital and medium format scanned film, I very much prefer the medium format film. If I make a 24" print from scanned 35mm film and an optical print from same, the optical falls apart.

"Traditional enlarging had limits that scanning doesn't with regard to holding the film flat in the enlarger. With scanning, that is solved. So you don't get those negs popping out of focus like you used to, and you can retain contest in a large print in a way what was hard optically. There is something about a large full-frame digital print that is thin to me; the colors are purer but less differentiated, and everything is sharp in a way that is unnatural to me. Regardless of sharpening. Scanned medium format is in many cases less sharp but has a depth that full-frame digital cannot match, and once you go above 11x17, is clearly better to my eyes. In reproduction, and online, and for colour accuracy, yes, full-frame digital. But it falls apart faster than you think."

Henry Richardson: "I have just finished the scanning of 10,000+ 35mm slides and negatives (color and B&W) that I have been doing little by little since the late 1990s. In the last 3–4 months I got really on it and scanned more than 6,700. If we are talking about scanned 35mm then I, in most cases, would say that even a tiny sensor digicam can do better. Not in all ways and not in all cases, but generally. Going analog the whole way, well, I will let others decide. I made rather detailed posts about this scanning experience in my last two blog entries (1/8 and 12/31) that I think some people will find interesting."

Dave in NM: "I've got a brick of Tri-X in freezer. Another one of these exchanges and I swear; I'm gonna be forced to load it up and shoot someone."

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)Featured Comments from:

mike plews: "There's an ancient Focomat enlarger in my basement that has a few tricks up it's sleeve too." [Focomats are "autofocusing" enlargers, in the sense that once you have them focused, you can change the enlarger height and image magnification without losing focus. —Ed.]

Steve J: "Not only has the rangefinder system survived, but the type of lens in the ad, the 50mm Summar, is one of my most extensively used lenses. The lens will become 80 years old this year, while the camera to which it's attached, a Leica IIIf, will hit 60."

Harold Merklinger: "It's not a IIIf but rather a "G" or IIIa. Here's how we can tell: 1. No rangefinder diopter adjustment around rewind knob. 2. Rangefinder diopter adjust is just visible on back of camera near rangefinder eyepiece. 3. Screwdriver slot in slow speed shutter setting knob. (IIIb has this too.) 4. 1st digit of serial number appears to be a "1". (There will be other models with a "1" also, but a IIIf will need a "5" at least.) 5. A IIIf would have a flash sync adjuster around/below the main shutter speed dial. Bottom line: camera is same age as the lens: about 80 years."

Mike replies: I think Steve was saying that his own camera is a IIIf, not that the camera in the advertisement is. But thanks for filling us in!

Rob L: "I have that lens, and a close relative of that camera, a '36 IIIc. Used it yesterday. It's still a bit of a fad, but hey, I'm a sucker for these modern gimmicks."

Mark Sampson: "The Rolleiflex 'Automat' of the early 1950s was called that because turning the film-wind crank also cocked the shutter."

Thursday, 30 January 2014

Spread of Robert Steinberg's portfolio for "The Albumen Alternative," published in the March 1983 edition of Camera Arts magazine. The four-color reproductions were good, but could not do justice to the originals.

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Written byJim Hughes

Who among us can truly fathom the undeniable allure of a work of art? In its first incarnation, Camera Arts published a portfolio of hand-crafted albumen prints by the photographer Rob Steinberg (March, 1983) that exhibited a certain subtle, and fragile, beauty. Each print was one of a kind, an amalgam of the seemingly long-neglected arts of paper making, pictorialism and, some might even say, alchemy.

Although most of our stories at the time were written by freelancers, these images so enthralled my editorial assistant at the time that she asked to write it herself. Her first feature. In her open cubicle of an office, she surrounded herself with the oversize still-life prints, essentially living with them each working day, literally breathing their rare air. In the end, her carefully wrought words caught the essence of one artist's passions. To forestall any possible damage, we made large copy transparencies and reproduced from these for the magazine rather than sending the irreplaceable originals to the printer.

The portfolio was well received by our readers, and the photographer called to express his satisfaction. But a few months later, I received another call from the photographer. "Now that everything is finished, when can I expect to receive my prints back?" he wanted to know. I think he may have had a gallery exhibit planned.

I thought the portfolio had already been returned, shortly after publication. I asked my assistant why it hadn't been. "I haven't been able to find it," she admitted. Her eyes welled up. "It was here; then it wasn't. I’ve been looking everywhere for it, but I didn't want to tell you the prints were lost because I thought they must just have been misplaced somewhere."

She remembered putting everything back in the photographer's large portfolio box, then sliding that back into its original packaging, which we always tried to save. The sturdy package was finally placed back on a shelf. Our records showed a log-in date, but nothing to indicate a return or a pickup.

We—meaning the whole staff, top to bottom—proceeded to turn the office complex, which we shared with Popular Photography, upside down and inside out. Nothing. Had the work been stolen, right under our noses, by a visiting photographer? Or was it an inside job? Perhaps one of our own staff members had developed an uncontrollable lust for the images. Or had our nightly cleaning service accidentally tossed the package? Everything and everyone was suspect. After a week of fruitless searching, we finally had to admit that the portfolio had simply disappeared. It was not only a mystery—it was a photography magazine's worst nightmare.

I called Rob to tell him the bad news. In a neat bit of rationalization, I think I used the word "misplaced." In any event, I said, it was clearly the magazine's responsibility. We intended to keep searching, but if all else failed, we ultimately would pay for remaking the prints—knowing full well that in his case, no amount of money could make up for the time, energy, skill, and passion involved. For his part, the photographer displayed more understanding than I might have had I been in his place.

• • •

Months passed. One day I received another call from the photographer. I thought he might finally be requesting recompense. No. Seems he'd been contacted by a woman—she sounded quite elderly, he said—who told him she'd found something she thought might belong to him. Asked to describe it, she said it was package of "lovely photographs, I think they are, that look like paintings."

She found them in a pile of trash in her Greenwich Village neighborhood, waiting at the curbside to be picked up by a New York City Sanitation truck. "I don't know why," she explained, "but my little dog pulled me right to them and started sniffing. Your address and phone number were inside the box, and I thought you might want the contents back."

Before long, Rob and his portfolio were reunited. Nothing was damaged and no prints were missing, he reported. But the mystery remained. How did a large portfolio belonging to a Boston-area artist make its way from an office building on the East Side of Manhattan down some 30 blocks to end up in a trash heap in the far West Village? What sort of thief goes to the trouble of making off with something so large and specific, of such obvious aesthetic and probably significant monetary value—even managing somehow to evade the watchful eyes of knowledgeable professionals—only to later totally abandon the endeavor?

Perhaps the episode represented something far more complicated, even more sinister, than I had imagined. As for the theft, if that's what it was, I had my suspicions, but never came up with anything resembling proof. So we would simply never know.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)Featured Comments from:

hugh crawford: "There used to be a well established 'thieves market' on Second Avenue in front of the Kiev restaurant, where I ate on a pretty regular basis. Every time I saw something that looked like a portfolio I'd check the name and phone number, call the artist or photographer, and get a window seat and keep an eye on things while eating my pirogi.

"Did I mention that these were the most stupid of all thieves? The police couldn't do much besides tell them to move, NYC being the sort of place where almost anything can show up on the curb (I've picked up a Kilfitt bellows setup, a Crown Graphic, and a process camera from the curb, and I know someone who retrieved a bunch of Irving Penn prints from a couple dumpsters), but the NYC Hell's Angels lived a couple blocks away, and the Hell's Angels' sense of due process is somewhat more casual than the NYPD's."

Luis Nadeau: "Hi Jim, Long time no see. Rob Steinberg was, in my opinion, the top printer in the world who could handle both albumen and platinum/palladium. Albumen was especially difficult. He tried to commercialize a palladium paper (with a trace of platinum in it) under the name of Palladio, starting in 1988. There is a (very poor) reproduction of one of his palladiotypes in my Encyclopedia of Printing, Photographic and Photomechanical Processes, p. 354. Unfortunately, his source of raw paper experienced a disastrous fire and even though they rebuilt their facilities, the quality of their products changed significantly. He had to abandon both albumen and palladium printing.

"By the way, thanks for that wonderful David Vestal obit. Regards from Canada."

[Luis Nadeau is a pioneering researcher and expert in the fields of photographic conservation and restoration, with a special interest in permanent and archival alternative processes, including the elusive Fresson process. He is the author of a number of influential books and is revered by many alt-process fans the world over. —Ed.]

Jim Hughes responds: "Luis, You may not realize it, but you are in no small measure responsible for my being able to write my biography of Gene Smith. I mean physically write it. Back in the early '80s, when our paths crossed in Maine, we had a discussion, actually more than one, about my plans to produce what I knew would be a massive book. But I had never used a computer, just a manual typewriter, to that point, and realized that what was then called 'word processing' might make a difficult job easier. But I needed something that could be transported back and forth to Maine, along with my burgeoning pile of research.

"You recommended a then-new Kaypro 'portable,' actually a 25-pound steel suitcase with a 7-inch screen and a full keyboard. You even sent me a color brochure after you returned to Canada. Based on your advice, I bought a Kaypro in, I think, 1983. This, of course, was before graphical interfaces, mice, wysiwyg, Windows and IBM machines. The Kaypro used the CP/M operating system, had a built-in memory of something like 64k and no hard drive, only 400k floppies (back then you could actually bend them!) yet still came bundled with a difficult but eminently customizable writing program called Perfect Writer (in all the years since, I've yet to find anything as good).

"My first draft of Shadow & Substance was more than 2,000 pages, plus 400 pages of perfectly matched endnotes. After seven years of research while running magazines came two full-time (jobless) years of writing and three years of revising and editing. Thereafter, I wrote the texts for two more books before finally succumbing to the allures of the Mac system, which I continue to use.

"So for this—and for your well-known encyclopedic knowledge of everything photographic—I thank you. Again and again...."

"I was 40 years old when I got my first dog. That first one, Fish, was a coydog (a coyote-dog hybrid) that we found in a campground at a lake where I was fishing. I got skunked that day, so she had to take that name—I wasn't going home without a fish.

"She was a wonderful dog—smart, loving, protective later of our newborn daughter, and a real character. She used to love to play with the bears. Many nights, I found myself running outside in a bathrobe, with a flashlight in one hand and a revolver in the other. Fish would have a bear treed, and I'd have to fire the gun to scare it off. When it got to the bottom of the tree, she'd bark and nip the bear's butt, then chase it off into the woods.

"Fish lived to a ripe old age of about 13. After years of diabetes, with daily insulin shots, she developed cataracts and lost her sight. Eventually she went deaf, and the day came when we did what we had to. She was a special dog, the standard by which I've measured every other dog."

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)Featured Comments from:

Richard Khanlian: "Fish sounds like a wonderful dog. When we lived in the foothills of the southern Rockies we had a golden retriever named Leo. At night he'd sometimes run out through the dog door when he heard a coyote pack nearby and come home the next morning looking quite pleased with himself. We used to imagine him sitting in a circle with the coyotes, swapping stories comparing life in the wild with life among humans. Maybe he even fathered a coydog or two."

Mark Hobson: "A beautiful picture of a cherished companion which, over time, will no doubt incite many pleasant memories. However...the chances that Fish was a coydog are slim to none, simply because an abundance of recent peer-reviewed DNA research—for instance here and here—strongly supports wolf-coyote hybridization and virtually no evidence for dog-coyote hybridization. Here in the Adirondacks, the coydog myth is alive and well as it has been throughout the NE where the Eastern Coyote is abundant. This coyote is much larger and slightly more aggressive than its Western relative due to wolf (Canadian Red Wolf)-coyote hybridization which occurred during the Western coyote migration through Canada to the NE. It was the size difference alone which led to the mistaken belief that coyotes had mated with dogs.

"Caveat—don't know why I get so worked up when I hear/read the word 'coydog' but, in any event, like it or not, I seem to be on a mission to eradicate the very idea of dog-coyote hybridization."

Mike replies: I think that's known as a "pet peeve." Not uncommon! And, thanks for the information.

Thomas Turnbull: "Wonderful picture and a touching story. What really arrested my attention, though, was its synchronicity with a PBS program that I saw just last week: 'The story of the mysterious coywolf, a mixture of Western Coyote and Eastern Wolf, premiered Wednesday, January 22, 2014, on PBS.' Very well done and definitely news to me! (Don't know anything about their going to the dogs, but the Coywolf, at least, isn't any Fish story….)"

David Brown: "In spite of Mr. Hobson's pet peeve, I owned a coydog as a child in the 1960s. 'Fluffy' (I am not making this up) was an intentional breeding of a domesticated coyote and a German Shepherd. She was a bit bigger than a coyote, but had all the markings of a classic shepherd. I miss her still."

Mike replies: I wonder if dogs and coyotes have different numbers of chromosomes, rendering their offspring infertile like most mules and hinnies? That would account for lack of DNA evidence for coydog lineage in the wild, but allow for single-generation mixes such as Fluffy. IANAE!

Wednesday, 29 January 2014

Just a few short musical notes: I've learned that Jimmy Page's project of remastering all the Led Zep albums, first talked about in 2012, is proceeding, and he expects to release the first three albums this year, with greatly improved sound quality. Along with (the hope is) some outtakes from the sessions paralleled by some selects from his own reportedly large archive of unreleased material.

This is not happening as quickly as expected, but as long as he gets to "Physical Graffiti" in my lifetime I guess I'm okay with it. (That and "On the Beach" were probably the favorite two albums of the most misspent year of my literally misspent youth.)

We last mentioned Imogen Heap (in "Canticle for a Tuesday Morning") when it was difficult to find Transit's a cappella version of her song "Hide and Seek." That's now easy to get: iTunes has it (search "Transit Vocal Band." Oren, who has a thing for a cappella, told me about that beautiful piece, which sounds like a hymn and is a reminder that "a cappella" means "of the chapel"). Speaking of a cappella, I assume fans have seen her virtuoso self-accompaniment in "Just For Now," which has aggregated almost five million views on YouTube. The woman is a wonder of nature and a treasure. So here's another nice thing: Imogen and Jeff Beck doing a fine version of Imogen's beautiful song "Blanket" at Ronnie Scott's in Soho in London. Beck's guitar is a perfect match for the song. With Tal Wilkenfeld, who I love, on bass. (I think Tal plays with Herbie Hancock now.)

Hump and Heap (Imogen selfie)

One of the problems I have in writing these days is the feeling that I've written the same thing before and I'm repeating myself. I don't think I've linked this to Beck/Heap "Blanket" before, but if I have, I hope you'll forgive me for repeating myself. I just ran across it again by chance, first time in years, and was reminded how much I like it. (I've mentioned Tal before here.)

Fans of lyrical, wistful indie rock injected with touches of '90s Britpop atmospherics might try Ivy's "Apartment Life," to which I just gave my once-a-decade listen and found holding up surprisingly well considering its advancing age. (Even though I'm pretty sure I heard some non-ironic horns in there. Which, okay, are beautiful in "Baker.") Songs to sample: "Never Do That Again" and "You Don't Know Anything."

Classical fans, tell me what you think of man o' the moment Jeremy Denk's 80 minutes of G major (i.e., Goldbergs). I'm finding the performance lyrical and full of color, not very musicological or "period" but loaded with musical understanding and feeling. I like, very much, but then I'm self educated, which makes me an "ignoramus visited with arrogance."

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)Featured Comments from:

Jakub: "I like the Denk quite a bit as well. I have several versions and didn't expect much new in his take, but there is something fresh and easy in his performance that sets it apart. Glad to see someone else has heard of Ivy. Also a good recommendation."

Mike replies: Well said..."something fresh and easy in his performance that sets it apart" is a very good expression of my response to it too.

Once again, it's time for me to play a notional whack-a-mole. An idea pops up. I smack it down. It pops up again, I smack it down. Repeat ad nauseam.

One of those subterranean burrowers popped up repeatedly in the discussions around Mike's post "Connectedness" and the preceding "Great Cameras" posts. It's that small format digital cameras are not suited to really serious professional photography, certainly not the kind that results in portfolio prints. Oh yes, maybe screenshots. But the hard stuff? You need a big sensor for that!

Nonsense. Balderdash. Hogwash. Bunkum.

Why can't we stamp this one out? Honestly and truly, real-world results just don't support it. They haven't for years. Not even by highly demanding aesthetic standards.

Dodging the red herring that pops up alongside this mole, I'm not saying bigger can't be better. 8x10-inch sheet film was better than 35mm. How many professionals found it necessary to go to that large? Damn few. You may be one of them. Fine. This isn't for you. It's talking about what, in general and on average, a discerning practitioner needs.

Two specifics drove me to engage the furry varmint again. The first was the notion that the Sony RX10 20-MP camera (right) with a 9x13mm sensor (that's 1:2.7 of 35mm size) wouldn't be capable of serious work, especially if one needed prints of "large" size.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by large. Unless you're talking bigger than 20x 24", I have real doubts that this camera won't satisfy. If you're talking a mere 17x22", I'm certain it'll perform. I've gone there with older, lesser cameras, and it hasn't even been all that hard.

Currently I'm working in the Micro 4/3 camp. Remember that $19.95 print that Mike and I offered a year back? That was made with an old model Olympus, the one with the original 12-megapixel sensor. It's 13x17mm (1:2 of 35mm size), not hugely bigger than the Sony RX10's. Definitely not enough to make a big difference in image quality, especially not with four years' worth of improved sensor technology backing it up. (And while I'm whacking moles, a reminder that most dimensions of image quality scale with linear dimension, not sensor area. Also addressed in previous columns. You can look it up.)

Okay, so some of you are going to say, "Well, yes but it does have a bigger sensor, and besides it has much fewer pixels so they're much bigger, hence they're much better." Which is not necessarily true. All pixels are not created equal; four years makes a big difference in the technology. Look at the image quality improvement between the old generation Olympus and the current OM-D series. A third more pixels in the same space, with massively better image quality all around. But, still, I get your objection. So let's wind back another generation, to a smaller format than the Sony RX10 has.

Before the Olympus Pen, I was using an all-in-one Fuji S100fs 11-MP camera, which had a 6.5x9 mm sensor (that's 1:4 of 35mm size). That is, only two thirds the size of the one in the Sony RX10, with just about the same pixel size. Now we're talking technology five years old, at least. I will certainly give Fuji credit for making really good hardware, but I'd be awfully surprised if Sony hasn't managed to equal it five years later.

Fig. 1. Photo by Ctein. From a Fuji S100fs, with teeny 1/4X-scale sensor. It prints just fine with a 15x20" image area.

Just how good was the Fuji? Good enough that a lot of the 17x22" prints I offer for sale on my website came from that camera (figure 1). In fact, before the Bay Bridge photo turned up, Mike and I had been discussing about offering one like this as an example for the small-camera/big-print sale.

Yes, you had to use the camera carefully to get that level of quality out of it, and it wouldn't provide it at high ISOs. How much care? Less than I needed to get the same quality out of 35mm film in large prints, that's for sure! And, oh yeah, that teeny-sensor, five-year-old camera had better noise vs. ISO characteristics than 35mm film, too.

I'm not saying my Olympus OM-D E-M5 ain't better. It's so massively better. But the Fuji was good enough, and there's no possible way that the Sony isn't a lot better than good enough.

Let's continue to climb down the ladder. How about them camera phones, folks? Two data points for your enjoyment. The first was a 20x24" print I made for Mike Johnston from a Nokia 40-megapixel cellphone camera. It looked fabulous! The only visible deficiency was just a bit of banding in the skies, a consequence of having only 8-bit JPEGs to work with and mapping from RGB into the printer's CMYK color space. In most photographs, you'd have never seen it. I could have massaged it away, but that wasn't the point the exercise. We just wanted a peek at the quality.

Fig. 2. Photo by Pete Su (a.k.a. psu). Made with an iPhone, processed entirely in camera, and uploaded to Flickr. It prints as an excellent 10x13-inch image. Might even be able to go larger, but I'm picky.

The second is the photograph that reader psu posted to Flickr from his iPhone and linked to in the comments to the Connectedness column (figure 2). Just to confirm my intuition, I downloaded the full-resolution version and printed it out, 10x13" image area—close to what Peter Turnley calls "European collector size." Just as I expected, it looked really, really good. I'd feel uncomfortable taking it bigger than that, but I am really fussy.

As a reality check, I showed it to Paula with no explanation and asked her what she thought of it.

She said, "It's a nice enough photograph. Doesn't knock my socks off but it's entirely okay." So I asked her what she thought of the technical quality, and she said, "Oh, that's fine. It's got nice detail, even in the background. And the tones look good."

Then I told her it was from a cellphone and her eyes got big, and she said, "Oh, REALLY!"

Okay, I'm done.

Until the damned mole pokes its head up again. I'm hanging on to the mallet.

Hot on the heels of yesterday's announcement, another new camera—this one derived from Olympus's well-received E-M5, called the E-M10. It's a somewhat smaller, lower-cost ($699) variation with a lower faux-pentaprism hump. The E-M10 has only three-axis in-body image stabilization instead of five (Ctein notes the five-axis IBIS makes a huge difference, especially with longer lenses). The E-M10 has built-in flash, and also WiFi functions à la the E-M1. The EVF in the E-M10 appears to be the same as the one in the E-M5. You can see the specs and compare with the specs Olympus's other OM-D cameras here. It's available in black or silver.

Also introduced is a new 14–42mm ƒ/3.5–5.6 EZ pancake lens ($349) (pictured on the camera at the top of the post), also available in black or silver.

The E-M10 can be ordered in a kit with a more basic zoom for an extra hundred bucks...you guessed it, in black or silver.

Finally, a nice new basic prime was introduced as well, a 25mm ƒ/1.8 (50mm equivalent angle of view). Right. Black or silver. It goes for $399.

These lenses look huge on the screen in these images, but bear in mind they'd be likely to strike you as being on the tiny side in real life.

(Note that as of this writing Amazon has 15 more E-M5's for only about $50 more than the new camera. Thanks to James Weekes for this.)

Mike

(Thanks to Ctein)

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)Featured Comments from:

John Krumm: "And for all E-M5 users feeling left behind, Olympus gave us a nice 2.0 firmware update today featuring ISO 100 (extended) and the smaller focus box that all the newer cameras have. I particularly like the more precise focus box."

Tuesday, 28 January 2014

January 28th, and already we have the first major new camera introduction of 2014: the X-T1 from Fujifilm. Which has been on a roll. A romp, you might even say. Cameras are a hobby business at Fuji—a legacy hobby business, but still a hobby business—but a bunch of people there must be having just a whale of a lot of fun.

The cost is $1,299 for the body. I haven't seen anything about when it will ship [UPDATE: Ken Tanaka says March]. Available in black only.

The X-T1, which looks like nothing so much as a mini mirrorless Nikon Df, is to the SLR form-factor what the existing Fujis are to rangefinder-style designs. It has an EVF inside a faux central SLR pentaprism hump, and it's styled like an SLR. An old SLR—it's bristling with knobs 'n' dials. And it arrives with a complete complement of accessories, including a leather case, a vertical battery grip, an additional hand grip in case you wish the built-in handgrip were bigger, four flashes that will fit and work (one of which comes with the camera), a remote release, and even a stereo microphone. Did I mention the body is weatherproof? The body is weatherproof. (Matching lenses—three weatherproof zooms with optical image stabilization—will be along later.)

Left to right: with vertical grip, bundled flash, handgrip extension, and case.

A friend with insider contacts in the business told me a decade or so ago, when Canon was the undisputed king of cameradom, that the only company Canon feared was Fuji—not Nikon, not Leica, not anybody else, just Fuji. And when Fuji throws its mighty might behind a project, you see it, brother. Note the speed with which the X100 morphed into the interchangeable-lens X-Pro1, or by which the line has proliferated (another industry insider told me in the '90s that that's how you tell when a camera has been particularly successful for a company—it sprouts variants), or by which the XF lens line has bloomed. Fuji even has an XF ~40mm-e pancake already, something I hadn't noticed before right now.

Anyway, what I was going to say is that Fuji has apparently taken pains to address some user concerns with its earlier cameras, mainly in the area of operational speed in various measures. And the team responsible for the X-Pro1's innovative Hybrid Multi Viewfinder has worked its formidable magic on the X-T1's EVF to make sure it's a great one. Dpreview says "its huge electronic viewfinder...is larger than the optical viewfinder on the Canon EOS-1D X."

We can talk about this more in days to come—let's be real, you're not coming here primarily for camera news—but it seems clear that Fuji has just filled another niche within its own niche in the industry. Somebody there loves cameras.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)Featured Comments from:

BH: "This certainly looks like another nice camera from Fuji, but what people who haven't shot with Fujis recently might not realize is that while the bodies and lenses are very nice, the files are even nicer. Make no mistake, Fuji has some serious sensor and software magic going on behind the scenes. These are the first cameras I've ever shot JPEG with because, quite frankly, they can do a better job with their RAW files than I can—at least with regard to colors. There's also some highlight/shadow preservation magic going on behind the scenes; the cameras handle high contrast scenes extremely well.

"Fuji has definitely been working out all the bugs the last couple of years. They're paying attention to their customers and providing them with updated products and firmware that address concerns. If you're on the fence about giving them a go this new body may be worth checking into."

Kenneth Tanaka: "The X-T1 will reportedly begin shipping in early March, Mike. My own opinion of Fujifilm's cameras and lenses could not be higher. I am not especially enamored by the X-Pro1. Good image quality in an innovative but clunky package. But I have been extremely impressed with the X-100/100s and the X-E2. And my collection of Fujinon lenses is second to none in performance (yes, including those German guys' glass). They're each light, relatively compact, fast, sharp, and durable. (They also cost approximately the same as the sales tax on that German glass. Belch.) So I've eagerly pre-ordered the X-T1. Woof woof, baby!"

Kevin Purcell: "The 'hump' is needed because the EVF optics can get rather big especially if you want a 'high magnification' (i.e. large apparent field of view) viewfinder. Olympus has noted this too. The upcoming Olympus E-M10 EVF noticeably 'overhangs' in the same way the Panasonic G5 and G6 EVFs stick out. The Olympus E-M1 hump is even bigger. In previous cameras Fuji has folded the optics in the top left, but that prevents some dials and a flash from being added above them. So there is a tradeoff between 'rangefinder design' and 'SLR design' and the placement of retro dials. The 'hump' is also useful for marketing (especially in the US and Europe) where people know a 'real camera' looks like an SLR (i.e. it has a hump)."

Eli Burakian: "Ah Fuji. I like how they're willing to try new things. I used the Fuji S5 Pro, which was basically a fuji sensor in a Nikon D200 body, for years. The dynamic range of that was incredible and still ranks among the best SLRs from now, and it came out almost a decade ago! I haven't tried any of their new stuff but I'm tempted."

Gordon Lewis: "This is what the Nikon Df should have been, both in terms of size, weight, controls, and layout. Better yet, not only is the body compact, so are the lenses. Are you paying attention Nikon and Canon? (Uh...apparently not.)"

Claude Evans: "Wouldn't it be interesting if Fuji were to make a digital version of the X-Pan panorama camera? The lenses were great, so no development costs there."

GH responds to BH (above): "BH, it's the X-Trans sensor that keeps many shooters away from the Fuji system in the first place. The CFA [color filter array —Ed.] scheme trades low ISO color resolution for better high ISO files, and, despite trying several raw converters, I never got on well with the files of my now sold X100s."

Steve Jacob: "I have been a huge Fuji fan since the first X-Pro1 came out. I was an early adopter with firmware 1.0 and the first three primes. At the time they were quite troublesome. Adobe did a very half-hearted job on the RAW files, focus was hit and miss and slow, and the camera performance was sluggish. But I didn't care. I was having a blast with the mechanical handling and the images were different: Colour and tone wise they just didn't look 'digital.' Zack Arias commented that these cameras do something special in the 'blue hour' after sunset that's just special, and I agree. Though I would also extend that to just about every other hour too. And skin tones are just beautiful.

"Now all the serious issues have been fixed, many new features have been added and I have a brand new camera. Same camera actually, only with Fuji's latest firmware upgrades and its superb new lenses. Fast, accurate AF and a whole bunch of new stuff, including focus peaking, that was not on the original. Two years on, Fuji are still supporting my camera and enhancing its functionality. This is a rare thing.... Even Adobe got its act together and other RAW converters have appeared too. Rumours are Adobe are coming out with another improved version.

"The X-Pro1 was the first emotional camera investment I have made for a long time. I went, I saw, I purchased. My brain never had a chance. It could so easily have ended in tears, but instead I have ended up loving my photography again. I would just like to announce it here. Fuji and I are are getting married. ;-) "

Monday, 27 January 2014

A tip to aspiring bloggers (I could seriously write a book about how to write a blog): people much prefer more, shorter posts then fewer, longer ones. The operative principle is tl;dr—texting shorthand for "too long, didn't read." Ctein knows it in Latin, but I couldn't find that.

Five short, entertaining, newsy, pointed posts are much better for drawing traffic than one meaty one that is five or more times as long.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

David Miller: "The Internet is full of froth; I prefer the deep, dark brew that underlies it."

kirk: "That's what I've been doing wrong...(smacks forehead!!!). Glad you are back in the saddle. We missed you."

Manuel: "Well, my motto could be—Longior, sequor (if it's long, I follow). Or: tl;li (too long; love it)! Welcome back, Mike. Hope you're in pristine condition now. And please—we faithful TOP readers like your posts long and thoughtful. (Come to think of it, 'long' is not a concern of mine when I blog; my readers don't seem to mind. Misinterpretation, however, can be a problem.)"

Thom Hogan: "In magazines, when this concept became the fad in the 1990s, the idea was called 'chunking.' Lots of small chunks of information that could be digested fast and where readers could be interrupted to go do something else and come back.

I resisted that trend at Backpacker. Sure, we chunked some things—basically things that weren't articles but were mostly just information regurgitation. But we actually sought to keep the long form active in the middle of the book.

"As a society we lose something when everything becomes tiny morsels that can be digested immediately. Media becomes more a consumption game and less a thought-provoking one. We've watched the average TV news story length go down, the average magazine article length go down, and everywhere you look there's more and more chunking going on.

"But think about it for a minute. Where do you really get the best information from? It tends to be 'deep' content. Books haven't gone away for a reason (though too many of them are chunking now, too).

"Stories—as opposed to information—have lengths that are dictated by the story, not by how much space you have available to present it or how small a chunk you want to present before you put in another ad."

Mike replies: I wrote a piece once comparing Network television content (back when that's all there was) to Kurt Vonnegut's 1961 short story "Harrison Bergeron," in which the Handicapper General makes smart people wear an earpiece that emits piercing shrieks so as to interrupt their thoughts. Sowing TV programming with ads has the same effect, I argued—not just on the attention of the audience but on the programming itself, because only some kinds of programming is suited to being regularly interrupted.

However, here on TOP, a week plus of long "vintage" articles causes a wholly predictable dip in traffic. A week of three or more short posts a day will cause a concomitant rise in traffic. Just the way it is in the noisy world...and when "eyeballs equals income"...and I will have medical bills to pay...well....

Always appreciate your comments, Thom.

Thom responds to Mike: "Re 'when eyeballs equals income': Okay, another pet peeve uncovered: traffic does not equal sales. I can't believe how many Internet startups get messed up with this notion. Yes, traffic can be good, but traffic by itself is not necessarily good. This gets back to 'quality of content' and therefore 'quality of eyeballs.' Quick question: would you rather have 100 people reading that regularly bought from affiliate links, or 1,000 that just dropped in to see if there was anything interesting and never bought from affiliate links?

"Amazingly, the affiliate programs get this wrong, too. They often chase Unique Visitors or Page Visits or some measurement stat other than the things they should track. B&H, for example, allows you to build links that track where the sales come from. Guess what? One of the big sources are my very long reviews, not the short chunky content."

Trecento: "Mike, Welcome back! And, it may amuse you to know that in some parts of fandom, tl;dr is pronounced 'teal deer', and, as an indirect result, there are any number of image search results.... P.S. I do hope you are feeling better."

[First published in the original, now long gone, Camera & Darkroom magazine. The original date of publication is lost to history—or at least it's good and buried—but it was some time before '94, in the era of the M6, well before the introduction of the M7 and far before the first digital Leica. (UPDATE: It was 1992.) My feelings about Leica have cycled up and down over the years, but were on an uptick when I wrote this. —MJ]

Photography is beset by a peculiar affliction, in that utterly necessary to its practice is what nineteenth-century commentators called the "magic black box," which in its most basic form is "a light-tight chamber with a hole in it." The hole has long since been replaced by a lens, and the chamber (in Latin the word is, of course, "camera") has over the years of its evolution been crammed full of, and surrounded by, of all manner of refinements both mechanical and electronic. It remains impossible to design and build a perfect camera; which means, of course, that humans keep trying, and the fruits of their attempts has been an endless succession of fascinating gadgets. So, side-by-side with the class of people who might be called "photographers," there has also arisen a type of people who are, first and foremost, lovers of cameras.

The two are often confused; the fact that the most detached and dedicated photographic artist must pay some attention to his equipment, paralleled by the fact that the most refractory equipment fanatic is also likely to take some pictures, only blurs the boundaries still further. No painter ever made such a big deal over his brushes, though, no sculptor his chisels, as the fuss we photographers and photography enthusiasts tend to make over our cameras.

In some ways this makes sense. Cameras can be delightful objects, extraordinary mechanical devices, historical artefacts, works of art or miracles of workmanship. Like a beautiful watch or a piece of jewelry, such things can give pleasure, all on their own, quite apart from their functional usefulness (or lack of it). Furthermore, a camera at its best is an intimate tool, and by its nature will help set the parameters of its user's working methods, even influence the type and the style of its user's finished work. And sometimes they can even insinuate themselves in their owners' hearts, like pet cats.

Still, cameras are ultimately only tangentially—one might even claim incidentally—connected to the significance of most photographs, no more closely than the pen is connected to a poem. The "peculiar affliction" I mentioned earlier derives from the fact that a substantial percentage of people who love photography evidently don't care a whole lot about photographs, other than their own. But many of them care a great deal about cameras. At the worst, the camera is in that case reduced to a fetish, a status symbol, or an appliance or convenience, like an electric toothbrush or the kitchen clock.

But at the highest reaches of the field there are two opposing currents: the camera collector, whose interest and passion is centered on the camera as both object d'art and historical artifact; and the master photographer, whose interest and passion is centered on making pictures which embody the best of which he or she is capable.

The area where these two groups overlap is understandably quite small. But at the locus where these two great opposing tendencies most exactly converge, there sits (upon a pedestal, one might say, backed by roiling clouds and lit by bolts of lightning) a single device, a camera of lore and legend: the fabled Leica M.

Although the Leica was not strictly the first 35mm camera, the Leica and 35mm still photography arose more or less simultaneously. The Leica’s inventor, Oskar Barnack, could not in his wildest fantasies have imagined the reach and extent of some of the design decisions he made in those days before the Great War, when he cobbled together a device for running exposure tests on common movie film (the first of two Ur-Leicas, now arguably the most valuable cameras on Earth). The size of the film itself was destined to become the worldwide standard for still photography. The shape of the rectangle, determined when Barnack simply doubled the standard 18mm x 24mm movie frame in order to eke a little more picture quality out of his little camera and to change the orientation of the rectangle relative to the film path, has since become the most recognizable proportion in all of still photography, familiar at a glance. Even the longtime "standard" focal length of the lens for the format—50mm—was selected by him (although the earliest prototype Ur-Leica has a 40mm lens, according to the British Leica technician Malcolm Taylor, who was engaged by Leica to clean and restore the priceless relic). Had Barnack known all that, perhaps he would have done some things differently—at the very least, bequeathed to us a better-proportioned rectangle!

He did well enough as it was, of course. Barnack entered into an agreement with the microscope manufacturing firm owned by Ernst Leitz, and in the uncertain year of 1924 the LEItz CAmera went into production. Before WWII there were some great photographers who specialized in Leica photography—Alfred Eisenstadt and Alexander Rodchenko are two names which come readily to mind—but the camera, in those days of TLRs and 4x5 press cameras, was essentially considered a contemptible toy, extreme and eccentric, dismissed among pros as "miniature." Then, in 1951, a group of Korean War photojournalists led by David Douglas Duncan discovered some remarkably sharp screw-mount lenses for the Leica made by a Japanese optical company recovering from the ravages of war, and excitedly began to carry the secret to other photographers. The company was Nippon Kogaku—Nikon—today perhaps the most respected camera company in the world. In Germany, Leitz responded by redoubling its concentration on optics with a doggedness that continues to this day, as well as, in 1954, introducing the single biggest redesign of the Leica made thus far in the company’s 77-year history: the M3, still the classic M camera and one of the most purely elegant devices ever made for taking pictures. (The Leica expert Erwin Puts detailed the designers of the M3: "Willi Stein designed the camera, the rangefinder is from Stein and Ludwig Leitz, the finder optics are from Heinrich Schneider and Willi Keiner, the M bayonet is from Hugo Wehrenfennig.") That same year, in America, Eastman Kodak introduced a revolutionary new high-speed film, which (following as it did on the heels of Super XX, or double-X) it called Tri-X.

35mm photography had come of age.

• • •

For a while, every camera company extant, including the upstart Nikon, wanted to be like Leitz. The amazing profusion of Leica copies is still keeping collectors busy and happy today. It was to be a scant five years before the introduction of the first significant Japanese SLRs, and a scant decade, perhaps (history seldom gives us precise beginnings or endings), before the SLR gained such momentum that its hegemony looked unstoppable. But that decade initiated a change in photographic seeing and a range of visual innovation that has only recently begun to appear used up. Just how significant that change was can perhaps best be seen by comparing Walker Evans’ scrupulously authored American Photographs—perhaps the best book of 1930s photography in America and the central work of Evans’ career—with Robert Frank’s 1959 masterpiece The Americans, which was in part an homage to the earlier work. Evans used a view camera, Frank a Leica.

In any event, the SLR, with its greater technical versatility, eventually killed off the rangefinder in no uncertain terms. All the Nikon and Canon system RFs, not to mention the Leotaxes and the Looks and the Niccas, are gone now.

Yet, somehow, the Leica M survived. The Leitz family finally sold the company just a few years ago, and camera manufacture now takes place at the German town of Solms, not far from Wetzlar where Barnack lived and where Leicas were traditionally made. The new factory is modern and beautiful and reflects the prosperity of the little company, but an M6 is still built the old-fashioned way: a tray of parts is delivered to each master craftsman, who like a watchmaker fabricates each camera by hand. As befits a camera of its exalted lineage (and price), QC problems are almost nil. The incidence of even minor glitches is about 1 in every 500 cameras, or, by rough estimate, about twenty times as good as the average for the industry.

• • •

David S. Landes, in his fascinating book Revolution In Time, recounts the quiet but epochal effect of quartz watch movements on the Swiss watch industry. Quartz is killing a craft which is literally centuries old. Mechanical cameras, reliable and durable though they may be, are under assault from a similar upheaval: electronics. Nothing has so revolutionized the camera industry (for better or worse) as the circuit and the chip.

One reason the Leica survives in this climate is because it is fanatically overbuilt. By the time cameras contemporary to earlier Leica Ms have become useless curiosities relegated to flea markets and junky antique shops, many Leicas are just getting well broken in, and remain usable for day-in, day-out photographing. You can handle a Leica M roughly, drop it occasionally, carry it with you wherever you go, and it will work and work and work. And it has no foibles. It is probably the least finicky, most reliable camera you can buy.

It is also one of the most expensive. A Leica M body retails for about $2,500, and can be bought new for right around $2,000. Each camera reportedly costs the company about $720 to build. This means they enjoy close to double the best-case profit margin of other companies. The mandatory 36-month Factory insurance program, which does not cover loss or theft but guarantees against any physical damage unconditionally, adds roughly $300 to the price of every camera body. There is a tiny minority of M-camera buyers who use the hell out of their cameras for 34 months and then smash them with a hammer or run them over with a car; Leica GmbH replaces them free of charge, no questions asked. Most Leica buyers, even heavy users, don’t have the heart to do any such thing. I certainly don't recommend it. (It's not like whacking the nose off the Pieta, but vandalism is vandalism.)

The overarching quality, rarity, and jewel-like precision of the cameras have made them second only to original prints as perhaps the most collectable objects in all of photography, and they're swapped and resold among collectors almost like a form of currency. For working photographers, though, this preciousness can be a drawback. It is not easy to take for granted a tool which costs as much as a used car. It makes it difficult to afford the cameras, too, and beginners or casual users are thus seldom familiar with Leicas. And it is a sad fact of life that many Leicas are built super-tough and ultra-durable in order to withstand the rigors of an occasional featherdusting as they sit, forever unused, on some collector’s glass shelf somewhere.

• • •

The expense and investment potential of a Leica contribute to masking the other really extraordinary thing about it: its handling. This is the greatest of the secrets shared by the camera's initiates. For, whatever they may have become, Leicas were, from the start, made to be used.

Manipulating an M is a learned skill. It may not feel intuitive right away, handled gingerly at a camera store. But, as Andrew Matheson notes, "It is a camera you can get to grips with." Those who have learned its ways are fervent in their praise, and share in their knowledge of its secrets like members of a medieval guild. For one thing, the feel of the winding crank and the shutter release are unimprovable. The solidity and ruggedness of the camera is awesome—Leicas are not fragile. The clarity and three-dimensionality of the viewfinder becomes addictive; with all but the widest lenses, the ability to "see around" your shot is a decided aid in recognizing better pictures. And, finally, there is zone focussing, a technique taught to me by photographer Carl Weese: protruding from several of the Leica lenses, there is a thumb-sized focussing knob. With practice, it is possible to learn how to guess focussing distances by eye and set the lens to very nearly the proper degree of rotation before you lift the camera to your eye. This is a learned skill, and depends on the photographer. I got very good at it at one point, and would show off my ability for the entertainment of others like a dog that can do tricks. But, once mastered, it unquestionably has an appeal that even the most advanced autofocus is not able to match.

Then there is its unobtrusiveness. The Leica is extremely quiet and modest-looking. It doesn't threaten. In the field or out in the street, where Leicas are most at home, this gives it an edge which can hardly be overstated: pictures can almost be stolen, as for instance Robert Capa’s first published photograph, of Leon Trotsky, was made surreptitiously, from under Capa's coat.

Finally, the Leica M is simple to the point of being spartan, so it is always ready. It won't break down, it won't defeat a reactive snapshot with safety interlocks, it won't grind to a halt with a battery running out of oomph—in short, it won’t quit on you. Its indomnitable mechanical simpicity lends it the functional beauty of utterly reliable performance. For this reason, it is a camera a photographer can come to trust. That in itself is something which ought be itemized in with the cost, right along with the insurance program and the rare-earth glasses used in the lenses.

• • •

The Leica, it has been said, both creates and resolves it own neuroses. No single camera has been the subject of such strong and deep passions, of such argument and debate, of such veneration and resentment; and no camera (unless you count all the wooden field view cameras in history as one) has so indelibly cast its mark over the history of the medium.

All sorts of arguments, pro and con, have been made over the years about the Leica. It has been sworn by, dismissed, ignored, and, by its partisans, much loved. Despite all of that, however, one thing is sure: for whatever reason, Leicas have been responsible for far, far more than their proportional share of great work. The list of great photographers who have been associated with the Leica during all or part of their careers is stunning; it is an honor roll. Off the top of my head, here's a very partial list:

In the end, that is what counts the most. The Leica, like the proverbial old soldier, may one day fade away. But it will never die.

Mike

Copyright 1992, 2014 by Michael C. Johnston

[Note: This post is a "rerun." I've been recuperating from a health event and trying to minimize workload, so the Comments Section has been closed for most of these rerun posts. However, I'm feeling better, so I'll keep the Comments open for this one. But please, go easy! —Ed.]

Featured Comments from:

Yonatan Katznelson: "Never once have I felt the slightest twinge of a desire for a Leica...until now. Sigh. This too shall pass."

latent_image: "Well, actually the date is not lost to history. Publication date was August 1992. That was a great issue featuring articles on James Fee and Walker Evans."

Mike replies: Thanks! And I loved that article about James Fee too. Very unfortunately he died early (same age I am now, 56) in 2006, of liver cancer, at his home in Beverly Hills. But his website is still up.

It's been kind of interesting this past week-plus, going back through a small amount of my old stuff.

There's a lot of it. Forty-odd editorials and articles from Photo Techniques (almost none of which I have); a dozen or a dozen and a half articles written for Ed Buziak's Darkroom User magazine in the U.K.; 40 or 50 articles from Camera & Darkroom; 80+ columns for founding editor Ailsa McWhinnie's Black & White Photography magazine in the U.K.; 100+ "Sunday Morning Photographer" columns published on The Luminous-Landscape, Steve's Digicams, photo.net, and fotopolis.pl; 1,349 posts on the old original Online Photographer (lots of them trivial, of course); and 4,359 posts and counting here (ditto). Not to mention sundry articles and reviews written for various arts magazines, newspapers, and local outlets. Oh, and then there was the short-lived print version of TOP, "The 37th Frame." Probably only 10% of the published material and 2% of the blog posts are worth preserving, but I'm sure I'm incapable of finding all of it, much less combing through it all for the best bits (I don't seem to have digitized versions of any but a few of my B&WP columns, for instance, which is odd, as I submitted my copy via email). Plus, believe it or not, I've written a fair number of unpublished pieces (mostly parts of intended books that I was never able to finish).

Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, in 1781, upon being presented with the latest volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: "What! Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?"

Scribble scribble. I'm no Edward Gibbon, but I did find one old thing I quite liked and think might still have some use and value for people: it's an extended article about how to pull together a portfolio. Unfortunately, not all of it is digitized—some is, some isn't. It's a subject I know a lot about and I warmed to the task of writing it up.

Is there anyone out there capable of working as a typist who has some spare time? I was thinking I could photograph the magazine pages and send them by email to be keystroked. I'd be glad to pay on the high end of whatever the going rate might be. It's only a few thousand words, but it would take me forever. Please leave a comment marked "Private" if you can help. Maybe I'll get that Portfolio article posted before I step out of "greatest hits" mode.

[UPDATE: Typists found! Thanks.]

Mike

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Medical science cannot cure the common cold. Add to that that human engineering and materials science apparently is incapable of creating a dog's chew toy that a) squeaks and b) that my quarter-pit cannot rip to shreds in a matter of minutes.

Take for instance one particular $9 pet shop toy widely advertised as "indestructible" (the ongoing experiment at TOP World HQ has comprised a statistically significant sampling):

Lulu's groomer Nicole also has a bully-breed who is larger and even stronger and more exuberant than Lulu, which is saying...well, a lot. I asked her if there was such a thing as an indestructible squeaky toy, and her answer was a very emphatic "NO!!" She said she even found a chew toy advertised as "tiger tested," which supposedly survived being gnawed on by full-grown tigers. Her part-pit had it strewn all over her living room in an hour.

This seems like a challenge that humanity ought to be up to, now that it's 2014, but guess not. Just sayin'.

Mike

"Open Mike" is TOP's weekly ramble in the park. Published occasionally on Sundays. A day late this week, and yes, Yr. Hmbl. Ed. is also typically a dollar short.

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Rick Grant: "When I saw the title of this post in my RSS reader I jumped into it straightaway in the hopes of finding the indestructible squeaky dog toy. But alas, there has not been a breakthrough in toy technology. I keep Border Collies and there isn't a squeaky toy that a Border Collie cannot reduce to fragments within half an hour. But for some perverse reason I keep buying them, only to be bitterly disappointed."

darr: "Human engineering and materials science do not equal the indestructible willpower and determination of a bored canine."

Sunday, 26 January 2014

[First published on mir.com in October 1999. You'll notice which parts are now outdated! —I was still four years away from my first digital camera—and still a magazine editor—when I wrote this. —MJ]

-

ByMike Johnston

I tend to get in a lot of trouble when I talk subjective lens-talk in public. I love lenses, and maybe half of my photography is involved in simply trying lenses to see what they look like.

I'm no optical expert in the scientific sense, so I'm often left "thinking" that I see something and believing that "maybe" it may correlate to a scientific descriptive term. I'd be much more at home in Japan, where subjective connoisseurship of lenses is a well-established tradition.

Here are a few of the things I believe about lenses:

• The "cult" of lens "sharpness" and quality evolved in parallel to the miniaturizing of film formats. It's very difficult for most lenses to look bad contact printed, or enlarged 3X; the smaller the film got, and the more it was enlarged, the more the characteristics of the lens were exposed; so along with the interminable push for more sensitive and finer-grained films and developers, the "cult of lens quality" emerged.

Case in point:

Nobody ever looked at a Daguerreotype and said "not very sharp. Too bad the lens was a dog." If you've seen a decent number of Daguerreotypes you'll know what I mean.

[Ed. Note: I couldn't know in 1999 how supercharged the "cult of IQ" would become with the advent of what Michael Reichmann dubbed "pixel peeping."]

• Nobody knows what anybody else means by the term "sharpness." Resolution of ultra-fine detail? Contrast? At what degree of resolution? Edge sharpness that accentuates boundaries? Some people like one kind of "sharpness," others another.

There was a whole movement in photography at the turn of the 20th century—called Pictorialism—in which the fashions and values in image quality were pretty much the opposite of what they are now.Image courtesy GEH; larger version here.

• Sharpness doesn't matter. Seen from a gestalt perspective, images can be very diffuse and broad-brush and still be recognizable, in the same way extreme abstraction can still be "read": that is, a line and two dots can be a "face," and vague fuzzy patterns of light and shade can be figurative. Ever seen those "pictures" made from thousands of little pictures? Fine detail in that case is little pictures that don't have anything to do with Marilyn Monroe, or whatever the "big picture" is "of." (Forgive all these quotation marks.) Fact is, fine detail resolution doesn't necessarily have much to do with why many photographs work as art—it often doesn't contribute to greater recognition of the subject, or to meaning. I could provide a list as long as your arm of great pictures in which even coarse detail can hardly be deciphered.

Having said this, why should a lens be "sharp" and what does that mean?

Most lenses are loaded with aberrations of different kinds, most of which are visible in pictures. But people don't see them, I guess because they don't know what to look for, or what they're looking at when they see it.

Case in point:

Many of our readers never noticed the quality of the out-of-focus blur until we did our articles on "bokeh" (bo-ke, Japanese for fuzziness or blurriness). We know because they wrote and told us. (Some people never wanted to notice it: we know because they wrote and reamed us out, highly indignantly, for presuming to discuss it.) Yet many, many photographs have large areas of out-of-focus blur and always have had and always will have. It's a technical property of lenses. It's there in pictures. Why ignore it?

Similarly, you can see color fringing, linear distortion, coma, spherical aberration, falloff, and on and on, in pictures. Some people don't "notice" flare ghosts or obvious falloff, much less the many, much subtler cues as to how a lens is behaving.

• Some lenses go "well" or "not so well" with different kinds of films. Many color photographers are very preoccupied with the optical property of color transmission. This is not so much a concern with the film I use (Tri-X, a black-and-white negative film). That's a blatant example, but you can get as subtle as you want. Many descriptions of a lens that begin, "This lens looks..." actually mean, "This lens with this film looks...."

• You can't buy wine by the label, books by the cover, etc.

Case in point:

In the 1980s, German tycoon Heinrich Mandermann owned both Rollei and Schneider, and Schneider built a set of wonderful new lenses for the Rollei 6000 series. Guess what? People wouldn't buy 'em. They wanted the magic word "Zeiss" on their lenses, and they'd buy older, bigger, heavier, more expensive, worse-performing lens designs to get it. Most of those outstanding Schneiders are now discontinued. German lenses aren't all better than Japanese lenses, Leica lenses aren't all better than any other brand, etc., etc.

• There do seem to be "house tendencies" among optical companies. Zeiss lenses do tend to have lousy out-of-focus blur (but there are exceptions); Nikon lenses do tend to be super-sharp-looking but at the cost of a certain harshness that can make Caucasian skin look pasty (but there are exceptions); Canon does favor a smooth, high-res but not quite so high-contrast look that works best with color film (because color can function as contrast: it can help distinguish adjacent areas and their edges. Imagine two areas of equal value, but one red and one green. In B&W, it may all be one undifferentiated gray; but in color, these two areas would tend to, ah, stand out from each other. ZAP). But there are exceptions. Re Leica, some Japanese savants, I'm told, can wax poetic regarding the philosophies of the era of Mandler vs. the era of Kolsch.

• There is indeed a rough correspondence between price and excellence. The reason is that a higher selling price relaxes some of the most pressing design constraints, and gives more options in lens design, manufacturing tolerances, and the selection of materials. The price scale mapped against marketing efforts confuses the issue so much that the correspondence is never terribly reliable, however.

• Lens tests are always limited. They almost never give you data, they almost never sample enough of the many parameters under which a lens can be used, they almost never adjudge sample variation, they almost never consider how well a lens will remain in spec over time, and they almost never contribute to your understanding of what the lens will actually do, with your film, in picture-taking situations typical for you, in terms of the results you're looking for. (One thing lens tests can offer is a comparative grading to make shopping easier.)

Most especially, lens "tests" which purport to reduce the quality of a lens to a single number, grade, or ranking, are always of limited validity.

Always. There is no exception to this rule. Most of them don't even tell you how the disparate performance parameters are weighted! For instance, what if money is no object to you, and image quality is of paramount importance, and a lens tests weighs "value" highly in its final rating? What it if rates distortion as unimportant, and you're an architectural photographer who needs straight lines at the edge of the picture to look straight? What if it penalizes a lens for severe falloff wide open, yet every time you shoot wide open it is in "available darkness" with nothing but blackness and no important subject content anywhere near the edges? What if it rates ultra-fine detail resolution very highly but you use a grainy film with limited resolution? What if it "tests" the lens by photographing a test target four feet away at ƒ/8, but you're an aerial photographer who needs to know how the lens does wide open for subjects half a mile away? Even subtle and informed lens tests are only partly complete. The more simplified the conclusion, the less useful that conclusion is.

Well, there's a lot more to it than this, of course. Where the fruit of all my investigations have led is that I sort of understand what properties I personally tend to value in a lens for my own work with my own film, and how a large number of the available lenses compare with each other within the focal-length ranges I work with. I.e., I don't know much...and the more I find out, the less I find I know.

But here are my top ten recommendations:

1. Believe the evidence. If you love a lens but it's not "supposed" to be good, believe the pictures before reputation, published test results, or the status of the brand.

2. Don't believe one or another property should be important to you unless it is. If a lens is universally admired because it is super-sharp, don't accept this uncritically as being a good thing. Maybe that lens looks harsh to you; maybe your work needs a softer look.

3. New isn't necessarily good. Manufacturers in many fields typically expend a lot of effort and engineering expertise learning how to remove value from products—that is, to make it possible to make a "good enough" or an "almost good enough" product that can sell more cheaply and/or have a higher profit margin.

With one lens design I've investigated thoroughly, I can virtually trace the bell curve as the makers first learned how to improve it and pour value and performance in, and then as they subsequently discovered how and where they could cut corners and suck value back out!—i.e., how they could reduce the number of elements, where they could get away with planar rather than spherical surfaces, which surfaces could be single-coated or left uncoated as opposed to being fully multicoated, how they could cheapen the barrel. The lenses at the top of the bell curve perform best, and some of these were manufactured 30 [Ed. Note: now 45!] years ago.

4. Good isn't necessarily that good. Science can make much better lenses than any photographer will pay for, or than can be purchased for use on any camera extant. My Dad used to oversee the satellite program at NASA, and I learned from one of his colleagues how much better military surveillance lenses are than any commercial camera lens ever was. So are the stepper lenses used to make computer microchips. It's all relative.

5. Bad isn't necessarily bad. There are two parts to this rule. First, some very inexpensive lenses are surprisingly good; and second, even many poor lenses are good enough...for some use or other. Artists are people who can take tools and materials, perceive the properties of these tools and materials, and apply them to good effect. Good photographers can make, and have made, great photographs with really, really "bad" lenses. Consider that the great Edward Weston bought his most-used lens for $5 at a Mexican flea market.

6. Never be blinded into thinking that good tools = good work. The world is full of photographers who churn out sharp but wretchedly poorly-seen pictures. They can break their own arms smugly patting themselves on the back for owning the latest apo-this or aspherical-that, but regardless, Johnston's eighth law still holds: crap is crap.

7. Despite the high popularity of testing lenses and the great relish with which photographers argue the topic, ever wondered why photographers have no enthusiasm for conducting simple surveys with pictures?

Actually, much of the seminal research into lens quality and proper exposure (in the 1930s and '40s, recounted by Stephen Benskin in a wonderful series of articles I published in Photo Techniques) was done in just this way. Pay attention to what viewers of your pictures notice and tell you. Interestingly, the only lens I've ever used that got much in the way of compliments from non-photographer viewers was a relatively modest 40mm ƒ/2 Minolta Rokkor-M.

8. This is again apposite to the foregoing point—most viewers can't tell. Mushy feelings of delight at the optical prowess of this or that lens squelching up from within ourselves is something we photographers pursue for ourselves and for other photographers. Viewers of pictures just look at the pictures, not how grainy the film is or how luminous the shadow detail is said to be or how many lp/mm the lens allegedly resolves on a test bench. How would they know anyway? They have no standard of comparison. So, much of lens connoisseurship is something one does for own's own diversion and gratification. Best not to confuse it with something done for the sake of another, for the sake of pictures, or, for that matter, with anything important. But...

9. Never sell a good lens! The three best lenses I've ever used are gone with the wind, swept out along with the sundry detritus of this acquisitive hobby. Woe is me!

Finally,

10. Don't sweat it too much. The search for the perfect lens is a fool's errand; it's like searching for the best-tasting coffee. No matter how good it is, it's just a cuppa. Enjoy it and get on with your morning. (Analogously: get on with your photography.)

Hope this helps—

Mike

Copyright 1999, 2014 by Michael C. Johnston

[Note: This post is a "rerun." I've been recuperating from a health event and trying to minimize workload, so the Comments Section has been closed for most of these rerun posts. We'll get back to normal soon. —Ed.]

Saturday, 25 January 2014

I'm nearing the half-century mark in age, and I've been in love with pictures since early childhood, when my parents, bless their hearts, allowed me to clip out my first "collection" from the pages of old National Geographic magazines. Fortunately my love of pictures continued and my sanguine acceptance of vandalism did not.

My biggest problem with photography these days is one that fits right in with the mission of the magazine you hold in your hands: for the most part, I don't like color photographs as well as black and white ones.

Yes, I know that many human beings are wired to feel the opposite. My little boy startled me at age five when he offered his first critique of Daddy's artwork. He had asked me to take a picture of how small his watermelon hard candy had gotten in his mouth, opening his mouth wide and presenting the remarkably diminished candy on his tongue. Never one to refuse a proffered photo opportunity, I took the picture. Later, though, when I showed the print to him, he launched into a tirade that I still think is wonderful: "Daddy, you need a new camera. Your camera is a grays camera. You need a colors camera. When you buy another camera next time you should make sure it has colors in it." And so forth. It was a pure critique, succinct and pointed—art criticism direct from a five-year-old heart.

I have an old friend, Kim Kirkpatrick, a (color) photographer who teaches at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, who I know has a visceral attraction to colors for their own sake. He's a gardener, and he'll plant particular flowers just because of their colors. He and his wife used to drive around to look at Christmas lights just for the pure visual pleasure all those colors offered. Once in a while, the point of one of his photographs might be summed up with a comment such as, "just look at that orange!" Kim doesn't just see colors. He feels them. Others can't even really "see" his gardens, I suspect, even if they are sensitive to the arrangements of colors, because I'm sure he plans for the colors to shift and change as various plants go into and out of bloom. It's an artwork in time that itself unfolds like a blossom, with a pace across the season and a life that progresses in phases and stages. Seeing it once is like seeing two minutes of a movie: you can't get the whole picture, the whole effect.

Whenever in my life I have mimicked a successful photographer, it has been with color photographs. My "best seller" is a color 5x4 photograph of a distant sunlit yellow canoe on a lake at dusk under a cloudy blue-gray sky. It would have served as the "cool with warm accent" shot we were required to do in my basic color theory class in school. People love it, and no doubt they would love it much less in black and white.

Oddly enough, too, I have a well-developed color sense and I’m fastidious about color. My brother, now a Ph.D. psychologist in Rhode Island, once worked for Dr. Norman Rosenthal, who developed the diagnosis and treatment for seasonal affective disorder or SAD. They had for one reason or another developed a series of color perception tests where test subjects were presented with mixed-up colored disks representing a scale of slight variations in hue, value, or chroma and asked to arrange them in order. I aced the tests. I find I’m quite sensitive to the polluted colors common in tri-layer films and papers, what Dr. Bertram Miller called “arrastres” in his color photographic theory. Given an adequately calibrated monitor and printer, I'm very good at color corrections, and I often dislike what passes for "adequate" color correction in other photographers’ work: it sometimes seems obvious that they can't see what their own pictures need.

Old analog techniquesI've never really liked color photography from a technical standpoint. Digital color is better than the color of most analog techniques. The history of color analog techniques is a history of make-do, of never-quite-good-enough. I was repelled by Cibachrome, unless it was masked; John Szarkowski, the great curator, was so disturbed by carbro prints that he seldom showed the work of Paul Outerbridge, who worked in carbro. The only traditional color methods I really cared much for at all were the very rare Kodak Azochrome process (a sort of midway point between color and black and white), dye transfer, and, sometimes, Kodachrome 25 (not 64), provided that the subject luminances matched the film's scale adequately. Digital color is getting better, but it's "simple" in that there are just not enough colors represented in the average DSLR color palette, to my eye at least—digital prints miss the subtle variations seen in large format color. But they are more often much more pure, which is an improvement.

But still, there is just something about color that robs photography of what photography offers me at its best. I think most people have an emotional response to color, which can then be educated and refined by practice, delectation, and connoisseurship. But to me there is just something so pat about color snaps—so quotidian. There is no mystery to them. Or something. I really have no idea, you see, what it is. Tones of gray move me, and colors don't.

This is often lumped into the common criticism, "color is too decorative," a tidbit of dismissive wisdom I think began to circulate in the 1970s. "Color is distracting" is another once-common cavil.

I'm not sure either of those things ever really meant anything to me. Neither accusation has any power any more; where black and white was once the standard and color had to prove itself, the situation is now fast reversing. But it's not a political position in my view. It's a matter of personal response. What seems to be the bottom line for me is that black and white grabs me, satisfies some gut need; it speaks to me. I have an appetite for it, a love for it that is emotional, somehow, native, and wordless at its root. I drink it in. Color doesn't slake that thirst or nourish me as much. Somehow the way that black and white transforms the world makes the subject of the picture more real to me, even though it's less literal—richer, even though there's less information there. It's as if it shows the bones of reality beneath the surface flesh of colors, the truth behind the world's mask. Maybe that's just me.

Proud New Papa Richard, with Keller: A pleasant enoughfamily snapshot in color...

...Achieves much more richness, resonance, balance, and emotional depth in black and white. I simply find it more satisfying. Otherpeoples' mileage, of course, varies.

Tones move me, colors don't I've been shooting more in color recently, because I'm shooting more digital and color is digital's natural mode, at least in the technology that's available to me. My friend Carl Weese once said that digital is the coming of age of color photography, and I think he's right. Yes, you can convert color digital pictures to black and white, and I often do. But how silly is that? You take a Bayer array, that devotes four photosites of three colors to every "parcel" of light rays, and then arrives at intermediate colors by very complicated extrapolation algorithms. How much simpler it would be to simply record value only—that is, illuminance—at every single photosite! Black and white sensors would have more resolution as the same number of megapixels in color, and the processing would be considerably simpler. Perhaps the dynamic range could be better, too. I hope we'll have dedicated black and white sensors someday soon, even though most people can't see why we should want them. I do. I like "grays cameras."

In the meantime, I shall continue to photograph in color, convert it when I can, and miss the days when the colors of photography, as Robert Frank once famously quipped, were black and white.

Mike

Copyright 2006, 2014 by Michael C. Johnston

[Note: This post is a "rerun." I've been recuperating from a health event and trying to minimize workload, so the Comments Section has been closed for most of these rerun posts. However, I'm feeling better, so I'll keep the Comments open for this one. It might be a good way to ease back into work. —Ed.]

Friday, 24 January 2014

The little three-letter word "pro" (it aspires to be a four-letter word but comes up a bit short) has the longest "legs" of any marketing term ever used in photography. Why? What's so important about being a "pro"?

The way I look at it, most professional photography is very competent. On a ten scale, professional work averages in the 8 range, sometimes achieves a 9, and seldom falls below 7. Okay. Fine-art photography and working photojournalism, on the other hand, can sometimes sink to the 4 to 6 level—when you take more risks, you fail more—but they also give us almost all the 10s.

I've never really understood the eternal appeal to the amateur of the three-letter word.

Pro qualityAfter having thought about the matter for two [Ed. note: now three] decades, here are the first principles of what actually, in my opinion, distinguishes pros from the the rest of us:

They shoot a lot more.

They edit a lot better.

This week's column isn't about shooting, but I'll make two comments in this context. Pros have two distinct advantages. One is that they accept assignments, and the other is that they shoot even when they don't want to. Assignments are important to your skills because they can stretch you—they don't allow you to fall back on your typical M.O., whatever that may be, and go shoot whatever you're most old-shoe comfortable with for the umpteenth time.

Why can't amateurs do self-assignments? Well, we can. But we seldom do, because it requires discipline, and discipline is a commodity in short supply for most of us...especially when we're telling ourselves that we're doing something "for fun."

Also, the things we invent for ourselves as self-assignments usually aren't as challenging as the things an art director or a commercial client can sock a professional with. To give you a brief example, a pro studio photographer I once worked for once had to shoot a naked woman wrapped in roofing material, and, later, a bike messenger climbing a skyscraper with a pigeon perched on his helmet.

You can't make crap like that up.

This segues into the second point about shooting, which is that most amateurs shoot when they feel like shooting—when they want to, when they're feeling enthusiastic, when they're motivated. Pros shoot whether they want to or not. This is a big advantage for the pros. The more time you spend shooting, the better your results will be. Drag your arse out of the house on a regular basis, and you will do better than if you don't.

This is why I always encourage amateur photographers who want to get better to set time or volume goals as opposed to results goals.

Edit like a #$%!&erBut where pros really have it all over amateurs—and where most amateurs are all wet—is in the realm of editing.

Most amateurs are so bad at editing that they don't have to look any further for the reason why their photography is not as good as it could be. In no particular order, here are a few of the pitfalls of amateur editing:

Amateurs don't limit themselves to the best shot. They'll "work" a subject and shoot a roll or two, and keep every picture they think is good—even if there are eight or ten of them and even if several of the pictures are very similar. Friends, the very soul of good editing is to pick one that really matters and throw the rest aside. You gotta choose. Difficult and painful though that may be.

Pick the one you're gonna go with: Rarely published variants on the most famous portrait of Ernesto (Che) Guevara by René Burri

One of the very hardest things for amateur editors to do is to let go of near-misses. We may have had high hopes for a particular shot. We may have almost achieved something great. But always remember, the key word there is "almost"—not "great." Let 'em go. I know, it's tough.

Sometimes amateurs don't shoot enough to even get a good shot. Everything they're dealing with editing is in reality a near-miss or worse! When all you've got is chaff and there's no wheat, it makes editing exponentially tougher. Solution: entertain in your mind the possibility that all the pictures you're trying to edit from actually suck, and there isn't a single good one in there. Hey, it's not so bad. It happens to all of us sometimes.

Amateurs are sentimental. It's not the greatest picture of a kitten, but he's such a cute little kitten. How could anybody not like the little guy? Be ruthless. Give that cat the boot.

Spend time at it: Sometimes amateurs fail in editing simply because they don't bother to do it. In general, pros spend a great deal more time editing than amateurs do. First of all, they have to, because they shoot a lot more. But they also know that editing is the flip side of shooting—the other side of the same coin, the other end of the same stick—and almost as important to the final result. Remember, pros aren't necessarily more talented than you are: they just shoot a lot more and show a lot less.

Don't confuse related but separate issues with the picture in front of your nose. Example #1: You used your best new Leica lens you're so proud of, and the picture is soooo sharp. Bah—if it's a bad picture, the fact that you took it with your new 28mm Summicron just means it's a sharp bad picture. Cull it. Example #2: The picture looks kinda like a famous shot you saw in a book. You're not entirely sure what makes a good picture good anyway, so you chose something that looks like somebody famous took it. Sorta. Example #3: You worked so hard to get that shot—you got special permission to get some kind of special access, you went home to get your super tele zoom, you waited for just the right light. Clue: you get zero credit for crap like this. Viewers will not be saying to themselves, "Well, it's a pretty ordinary shot that really doesn't do anything for me, but you know, I'll bet he worked really hard to get it." Don't be sentimental about your own labor. Let go of your memories of how much you wanted it to work and how hard you worked to get it to work, and just look coldly at the picture you got. You get the idea.

"To thine own self be true." Sometimes we take good pictures that are other peoples' good pictures. Some are you, some aren't. Know the difference.

How to become a better editor So how do you get better at this? Well, the usual admonitions apply...be organized, keep up with it (wish I could take my own advice), don't set impossible goals, keep moving on. But here are a few specific strategies that may help you improve your editing skills.

1. Use time to your advantage. Time can help you sort a jumble into a kind of order that makes sense. I recommend editing in two stages—a rough first pass, and then a more considered hard edit after some time has passed. When work is new, it has a different effect on us than when its novelty starts to wear off.

2. Get input. Ask other people! See what others respond to. At the very least, they bring less emotional baggage to the pictures. It's worthwhile to remember that you're the final arbiter, and you're under no obligation to be bound by other peoples' taste. But, assuming you have sufficient spine to make the final decision alone, input may help clarify.

3. Look at real pictures. Don't imagine. Don't edit in your mind. I personally think the best way to do this is to use an Editing Board, a place where you pin up prints of pictures you're trying to sort out your feelings about...in fact, I recommend this so often that my face turned blue a long, long time ago.

The Editing Board is a mystery and a delight, definitely one of the more cool things about photography. If I take fifteen work prints that I just shot and put them up on the board, I might think at first that all fifteen are of roughly the same quality. Then, after looking at them for a week, I find that I really like three of them and couldn't care less about the other twelve. I can't tell you exactly how this happens. It's like, I don't know, cream rising to the top or something. It takes some time, but once that separation occurs there's little doubt in your mind as to which is what. Try this. I can't guarantee it will work for you, but it might. And if it does, it's a powerful, powerful tool.

But however you work, whatever your method, just make sure you look at the actual pictures.

4. Be three times as ruthless as you think you have to be. You get better by doing your best and then moving on, not by trying with infinite patience to salvage everything you shot in the past that has the least little bit of merit (a typical amateur gambit, and one that serves to keep amateurs locked in amateurishness).

5. Finally, don't take editing lightly. Well, not if you aspire to actually accomplish something, that is. If you're just dorking around, be my guest and do any tomfool thing you want! Editing is a very important part of the process of being a photographer. If you're still reading this, chances are good that it's an area where your game could stand a bit of improvement.

And I'll let you in on a little secret: that's true for the majority of photographers.

Yup, even pros.

Mike

Copyright 2002, 2014 by Michael C. Johnston

[Note: This post is a "rerun." Because your host is recuperating from a health event and trying to minimize workload, the Comments Section, usually lively, is closed, but only for these "Classic" posts. Please join us in a few days when comments will be welcomed as usual. —Ed.]

I promised my regular readers an update on my status by now. I'm being treated for my illness and am recovering. I'm still dealing with aftereffects, feeling "fuzzy" mentally and finding it difficult to focus. I'm told that's normal. Fortunately my son and numerous other friends and relatives have been very helpful and supportive.

About that kickstand...The trouble is that TOP, as Ken Tanaka once memorably said, is a "bicycle business"…stop pedaling, and it falls over. It's difficult to step away and trust that I'm not wrecking the enterprise. I'm still not feeling well enough to get back to posting and moderating quite yet, but hopefully it will only be a short while longer.

So are you enjoying the "rerun" posts, or are they just old songs you don't need to hear again? If people seem to be liking them, I'll put more work into posting more until I gear up again.

Anyway, not to worry. I'm doing everything I should to get good treatment, and, in the immortal words of MacArthur, I shall return!

Thursday, 23 January 2014

Robert Capa, Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death,Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936

One of the fundamental problems of photography not necessarily encountered by any other type of artist is the problem of access: to photograph something, you ordinarily have to be in proximity to it, or in a position to see it, or at least at the proper standpoint—and being there is not always easy or safe. The ultimate example of the exclusivity of access is probably pictures taken on the surface of the moon, but Danny Lyons' insider photographs of a motorcycle gang in The Bikeriders and Larry Clark's documentation of a violent drug subculture in Tulsa are good examples as well—more recently, it was a big part of Taryn Simon's An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. One of my own mentors in photography, the late Steve Szabo, once answered a student's question "What should I photograph?" by asking back, "What can you photograph?"

Above every other genre of photography, however, war photography is the one which makes the most demands in return for access. Robert Capa (below, in 1945) was born in Budapest, Hungary, and lived most of his life as a "citizen of the world." He was in a gully with a number of other Spanish militiamen when he took the picture variously known as "Falling Soldier," "Falling Loyalist Soldier," or "The Death of a Loyalist Soldier." (The true title is given above.) Remorselessly specific and yet as symbolic as a flag, surprisingly simple, undyingly powerful, it is an authentic picture of very nearly the exact instant of a man's death. Originally published in LIFE in 1937, it is also in Capa's book about the Spanish Civil War, Heart of Spain.

It was not faked as has sometimes been claimed: forensic analysis suggests that the soldier, identified as Federico Borrell García, was already dead as he fell. The author of the best book about Capa, Richard Whelan, explains the research in depth in an excellent article about the picture originally published in Aperture magazine. To me, it's not a question worth discussing. My judgement is that by most indications Robert Capa was direct and honest as a man and a photographer. He was not interested in falsehoods and not petty about his ego. We have no reason to doubt his word now, looking back. The novelist John Steinbeck, who knew Capa well from their collaboration in Russia in 1947, said the goal of their collaboration was "honest reporting, to set down what we saw and heard without editorial comment, without drawing conclusions about things we didn't know sufficiently."

At only 22, Capa was the age of most graduating college seniors when he took the falling soldier picture. He lived one of those comet-like lives—bright, and brief, as well as vivid and romantic in the best mid-century movie-star tradition. He was hard-partying, handsome, invariably described as "dashing," a womanizer, a risk-taker—an outsized personality, much loved, eventually much missed. Unlike Henri Cartier-Bresson, with whom he founded the international freelance agency Magnum Photos with their friend Chim (David Seymour), Capa cared little for careful organization or the veneer of art in his photographs. He sought immediacy and authenticity.

Having already photographed four wars, Capa professed to have given up war photography before he was killed, famously saying that war was like "an actress who is getting old—less and less photogenic, and more and more dangerous." (How can that not bring to mind mad Norma Desmond of Sunset Boulevard?) He was in Japan for a Magnum exhibition in 1954 when LIFE called needing a photographer in Indochina. Once there, Capa left the column he was with to go up the road so he could photograph the advance. He stepped on a land mine. When he was reached moments later, his leg blown off and a gaping hole in his chest, he was still alive. He died clutching his camera, one of the very first of 135 photographers killed in the Viet Nam war. He was 39.

Mike

Copyright 2006, 2014 by Michael C. Johnston

[Note: This post is a "rerun." Since your usual host is recuperating from a health event and trying to minimize workload, the comments Section, usually lively, is closed, but only for these "Vintage TOP" posts. Join us in a few days when comments will be welcomed as usual. —Ed.]

Tuesday, 21 January 2014

Jan Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, c. 1663.Many of Vermeer's scenes have the look of north light.

Here's a simple assignment that's a good example of something digital can do better than film: the classic north-facing window-light portrait.

North light—long favored by painters—can be particularly beautiful in many types of weather, but it's often not very bright on the indoor side of a typical window. A film of ISO 200 or less often makes for a somewhat uncomfortable balance between slow shutter speed, motion blur, and apertures that are a bit too wide. But with a DSLR, ISO 800 or 1600 (particularly if you also have IS of some sort) can be very liberating, allowing you more latitude for experimenting to find the right aperture while still keeping the camera off a tripod and not risking subject motion blur.

A few hints: try it with and without the window in the frame. If you're going tight on the head or head-and-shoulders, use a lens with a 35mm equivalent of 100mm or more—as much as 200mm if you're going in tight on just the face. Experiment with the reflector, which can be anything from a large sheet of cardboard or Fome-core (often available in the school- and stationary- supply aisle of your local drugstore) or a white bedsheet held up by a helpful assistant—anything large and white (or just light-colored, if you're converting to B&W) will do. You can experiment with reflector angle, size, or distance from the subject; the closer the reflector is, obviously, the more it will fill. Less light in the background often looks nice (bright objects in the background may be distracting), although there's often no need to be fanatical about making the background completely black. The subject can be looking at the camera or not, or out the window.

This is the very light that many studio portrait lighting setups are attempting to emulate. The template—the source, you might say—for what artificial lighting often strives for. Getting familiar with the prototype at least once, and making a few nice window-light portraits, can "calibrate your eye" to what you might be looking for in the studio as well.

Try it. (I have a gorgeous one around here somewhere that would be a perfect example to show you, but it's too old and buried too deep and I can't find it. Sorry.)

Mike

Copyright 2007, 2014 by Michael C. Johnston

[Note: This post is a "rerun." Since your usual host is recuperating from a health event and trying to minimize workload, the comments Section, usually lively, is closed, but only for these "Vintage TOP" posts. Please join us later this week when comments will be welcomed as usual. —Ed.]

Sunday, 19 January 2014

There's been a small disaster chez Johnston. Over time, a massive tower of books had accumulated by my bedside. Don't get the impression these books were organized into neat stacks. Rather, the bedside reading was a great mound of volumes of every shape and size, some opened to where I'd left off reading—a miniature mountain of intricately interdependent structures, in some places weakened by slippery slick-paper magazines, constantly shifting and being shored anew as I occasionally extracted titles from lower down in the pile, jeopardizing everything higher up.

I guess disaster was inevitable. Last night I needed to retrieve a floor lamp to replace a broken switch, and alas, the base of the lamp turned out to be too great a stone in the foundation of the great pile. There was a bookalanche. The whole everlovin' edifice toppled; books slid and skidded every which way, picking up and carrying off other books as they roared by; mountaineers were killed, villages buried, massive conifers snapped like twigs, hikers lost forever. Send in the brandy-bearing St. Bernards. The floor by my bed and for a couple of feet in every direction is now an undifferentiated jumble of books, shin-deep. It is not a pretty sight.

And the irony? (There's always irony.) Buried somewhere in the carnage, among the casualties of the incident (only temporarily lost—I hope) are two books about how to stay organized as well as Henry Petroski's The Book on the Bookshelf, a fascinating and surprisingly deep history of the organization and storage of books.

I think I should have read a little further in that one, before letting it disappear into the great pile.

Mike

Copyright 2007, 2014 by Michael C. Johnston

[Note: This post is a "rerun." Since Yr. Hmbl. Ed. is recuperating and trying to minimize workload, the comments Section, usually lively, is closed only for these "Vintage TOP" posts. Please join us next week when the doors will be swung wide again. —Ed.]